August 6th, 2007
Shuttleworth grasps open source political message
To the Moon, Microsoft!
Canonical CEO (and space tourist) Mark Shuttleworth has grasped the anti-American political message of open source and is using it this week at LinuxWorld. (The picture was distributed by a South African embassy.)
It’s a massive departure from his own blog post in May, when he called corporate “patent trolls” the main threat to open source, rather than Big Green.
While his anti-Microsoft remarks in San Francisco are similar to what you might read here, and elsewhere, they have special resonance coming from a native of South Africa whose Ubuntu project is now based on the Isle of Man.
Today he’s calling Microsoft’s patent protection program “extortion” and demanding that Microsoft publicly disclose the 235 patents it claims open source violates or “move on.”
This is red meat, not just for Microsoft critics, but to anyone who feels America, and American businesses, act like bullies.
In his interview today Shuttleworth also said Ubuntu will support GPLv3 and was careful not to criticize Linus Torvalds, who supports GPLv2, saying the differences in the contracts is more of a kernel issue than anything else.
Nothing was said about Google releasing its Goobuntu, a version of Ubuntu Linux it uses internally, to the world.
But it’s Shuttleworth’s swipes at Microsoft and his rallying of anti-American sentiment which I believe will be the headlines, and should be.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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